New York University programmer Toby Schachman has developed Recursive Drawing, an experimental programming interface that enables coders to manipulate source code by building and manipulating fractal-like structures.

The nonprofit Code for America, a kind of Peace Corps for geeks, has led the way in bringing online efficiency to offline government systems, picking a team of tech stars each year to take time off from their jobs and offer their…

Rutgers University researchers have developed a device that could identify an individual user and rapidly switch a system's settings to adjust to the user, providing another layer of protection in addition to passwords.

Commercially available spyware originally designed to aid in criminal investigations is being used by repressive regimes to track political dissidents, according to Google engineer Morgan Marquis-Boire and computer science Ph…

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on track to become the first probe to orbit and study two distant destinations to help scientists answer questions about the formation of our solar system. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the giant…

A New Zealand politician has advanced a proposed software patent measure that contains an exemption for software embedded in other inventions. Critics say that loophole will be exploited by large corporations to patent their…

Google has received a patent for a device and methods for obtaining information with one's hands. Some observers view the patent as a sign of Google's plans for smart gloves and interacting with the virtual world.

Brookhaven National Laboratory researchers say they have precisely measured an important parameter of electron interaction known as non-adiabatic spin torque, which is essential to the future development of spintronic devices…

There are a thousand stories about the origin of the internet, each with their own starting point and their own heroes. Charles Herzfeld's tale began in 1961 on a series of tiny islands in the South Pacific.

Within a few years, Amazon.com's creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable…

Coming less than a year after the announcement of the first circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. This system, known as a circumbinary…

The rapid spread of cellphones with GPS technology has allowed police to track suspects with unprecedented precision—even as they commit crimes. But the legal fight is only now heating up, with prosecutors and privacy activists…

Many great ideas start out as scribbles on scraps of paper, as thinking visually is an intuitive way to grapple with abstract concepts. Part of the reason is the immediacy—thoughts can be captured and communicated in a sketch…

One of the things about the investigation into the Flame malware that's remained unclear for several months now is what ever became of the so-called Wiper virus that had been seen erasing data on machines in Iran and that led…